Though I'm a bit hungrier than resentful, as I'm having a hard time deciding what to eat instead. The stuff I have on hand is all more of the same stuff that I had earlier this week, and I was ready for something different. I wasn't intending to have any repeats for a couple of days yet. Missing a shopping trip doesn't usually lead to such a conundrum, but the nephew has been around raiding my larder quite a bit recently, and I've run out of several things, severely limiting my choices. Times like this I wish I was a cannibal. Then I could just slaughter and eat the nephew. There'd be and awful lot of leftovers, though, he's grown so fat on his scrounged food.
Ah, well. I can always boil some pasta. I'm sure I've got some olive oil and Parmesan cheese to put on it. There won't be much to go with it, though, and I'm out of beer so nothing to wash it down with but fruit juice and sparkling water. There is some vodka stashed away of course, so maybe I'll just drink and pass out. Good to know I have options.
Sunday Verse
I go back to May 1937
by Sharon Olds
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head,
I see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it - she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.